§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Cultural Falsehoods

Myron Magnet, in City Journal, dissects the 1960s and 1970s cultural paradigm that gained ascendency during the Baby Boomer student anarchist era. It’s a must-read.

Using the notorious miscarriage of justice in the Duke University lacrosse team case, he exposes the deeper, false cultural roots that support, indeed almost guarantee, repetitions of the phenomenon everywhere in the United States today.

The hodge-podge of contradictory cliches that passes for intellectually-approved culture today is a far cry from the unwritten constitution that Thomas Jefferson described as “the harmonizing sentiments of [1776], whether expressed in conversations, in letters, printed essays, or the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.?

Though Mr. Magnet doesn’t dwell upon it, this liberal-Progressive paradigm is merely the hubristic presumption, in modern clothing, of ivory-tower French Enlightenment philosophers. They believed, as do today’s liberal-Progressives, that, in Darwinian fashion, human nature is continually evolving and that intellectuals can corral and manipulate the factors that impel the putative evolution.

As has almost always been true with liberal intellectuals, they sincerely believe that their remaking of our cultural paradigm will benefit humanity. The problem is that their version of social justice always has proved to be ineffective, if not disastrously destructive.